Welcome to the Atlas Obscura Blog!

My name is Dylan Thuras and I am one of the co-founders of the Atlas along with Josh Foer. We are both going to be blogging here, along with Atlas team members Annetta Black and Seth Teicher. We are really excited to be able to bring you even more curious places via this blog as well as highlight the very best from our ever growing database of the world’s wonders and curiosities. To start you off, and tell you a little bit more about myself, I have picked one of my personal favorites from the Atlas, and in a way, what started me off down this strange path of curiosities collecting.

When I was around 12 years old I went on a vacation with my parents and visited a place in Wisconsin (I am indeed a Mid-Westerner) known as “The House on the Rock.” Fans of Neil Gaiman will be familiar with it as the meeting place of the Gods in his book “American Gods.” For a 12 year old me, it was a revelation.

More on this terrifying image after the jump…

A rambling house, museum, and sprawling complex of bizarre collections, it contained a squid fighting a whale that is larger the statue of liberty, the largest carousel in the world, a room the looks like it stretches for infinity, and an enormous collection of automated instruments. It took about 6 hours just to wander through it all. Built as a kind of architectural F-you to Frank Llyod Wright, today it is much more, and much weirder then that. The house filled me with such a sense of possibility, wonder, and amazement that something like this could exist anywhere, much less in rural Wisconsin that it started me on a quest looking for places that inspire that feeling and experience, one that I am very much still following.

Of course words will never do the house justice, so without further ado is a series of pictures and videos of the “House on the Rock.”

The squid and the whale are too large to really get a good picture of!

The infinity hall.

The carousel in action.

The Automated Music Rooms at the House on the Rock are some of the strangest most compelling things I have ever seen.

There is much much more that could be shown, but in the end to truly experience the magic that is the House on the Rock, you will simply have to visit. More information and back story on the house check the Atlas page here